John Dingell

For other people named John David Dingell, see John David Dingell (disambiguation).

John Dingell
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Michigan's 15th district
Incumbent
Assumed office December 13, 1955
Preceded by	John D. Dingell, Sr.
Personal details
Political party	Democratic
Spouse	Deborah Dingell

Rep. Dingell with President Kennedy

Dingell sworn in by Speaker Rayburn in 1955

John David Dingell, Jr. (born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, July 8 1926) is a Democratic United States Representative from Michigan and is currently the Dean (longest-serving member) of the House of Representatives, with a tenure longer than the entire current time served of 121 of his current colleagues. He is the 2nd longest serving Representative ever and the 4th longest serving Congressman ever. Since 1955, he has represented a district that was first in Detroit but has successively moved further into Detroit's western suburbs, currently the 15th congressional district of the state of Michigan.

With the Democrats' victory in the 2006 midterm elections, Dingell again became chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a panel he previously chaired from 1981 to 1995. He is known by the friendly nickname, Big John.

Biography

Congressional career

Dingell is of Polish and Scots-Irish descent. His father, John D. Dingell, Sr. (1894–1955), represented the 15th District from 1933 to 1955. He is married to Deborah Insley Dingell.

John, Jr. attended the Capitol Page School in Washington, D.C. as well as Georgetown Preparatory School and was a page for the U.S. House of Representatives from 1938 to 1943. In 1944, at the age of 18, Dingell joined the United States Army. He rose to the rank of Second Lieutenant and received orders to take part in the first wave of a planned invasion of Japan in November of 1945; the Congressman has said President Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb to end the war saved his life.

He then attended Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he graduated in law in 1952. He was a lawyer in private practice, a research assistant to U.S. Circuit Court judge Theodore Levin, a Congressional employee, a forest ranger, and assistant prosecuting attorney for Wayne County until 1955, when John, Sr. died and John, Jr. won a special election to succeed him.

He won the seat in his own right in 1956 and has been reelected 26 times, including a run in 2006 with no major opponent. Between them, he and his father have represented the southeastern Michigan area for 74 years.

His district was numbered as the 15th District from 1955 to 1965, when redistricting merged it into the Dearborn-based 16th District; in the primary that year, he defeated 16th District incumbent John Lesinski, Jr.

In 2002, redistricting merged Dingell's 16th District with the Washtenaw County and western Wayne County-based 15th District, represented by fellow Democrat Lynn Rivers, who Dingell also bested in the Democratic primary. The current 15th District ([3]) includes Wayne County suburbs generally southwest of Detroit, the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti areas in Washtenaw County, and all of Monroe County. For many years, Dingell represented a large portion of Detroit itself, though Detroit's declining population and the growth of its suburbs has pushed all of Detroit into the districts of fellow Democrats John Conyers and Carolyn Kilpatrick.

Dingell has always won reelection by double-digit margins, although the increasing conservatism of the white suburbs of Detroit since the 1970s led to several serious Republican challenges in the 1990s. However, he has won his last two elections with over 70 percent of the vote. With the retirement of Jamie L. Whitten at the start of a new Congress in January 1995, he became the longest-serving member in Congress. He is one of three people to serve in the House for 50 years, the others being Whitten and Carl Vinson. On Valentine's Day, 2006, Dingell became the second-longest serving member of the House, surpassing Vinson. If he is still serving in 2009, he will surpass Whitten's record for tenure in the House.

On December 13 2005, Dingell was honored at the White House with a Presidential lunch for his 50th anniversary. On December 15 2005, Rep. Dingell read on the floor of the House a poem sharply critical of, among other things, Fox News, Bill O'Reilly and the so-called "War on Christmas." [4]

Along with John Conyers, in April 2006 Dingell brought an action against George W. Bush and others alleging violations of the Constitution in the passing of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. The case (Conyers v. Bush) was ultimately dismissed. [5]

Energy and Commerce chairman

During his first stint as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Dingell was regarded by analysts as one of the four or five most powerful members of the House.

Dingell was well known, and often feared, for his vigorous approach to oversight. Rumor has it he hung a portrait of the Earth near his committee's hearing room, and pointed to it when asked about his committee's jurisdiction. He subpoenaed numerous high government officials to testify before the committee and grilled them for hours. He insisted that anyone testifying before his committee do so under oath, thus exposing them to perjury charges if they didn't tell the truth. His committee uncovered numerous instances of corruption and waste, such as the use of $600 toilet seats at the Pentagon. Dingell's Committee exposed fraud and corruption in government, a point he is proud of as he takes credit for forcing the resignations of many Food and Drug Administration officials, and sending many Environmental Protection Agency officials to jail for misspending public money and betraying public trust.

After serving as the committee's ranking Democrat for 12 years, Dingell has regained the chairmanship with the Democrat's control of the House in 2007. He told Newsweek that he wants to investigate the Bush Administration's handling of port security, the Medicare prescription drug program and Dick Cheney's energy task force. [6] Dingell told Time magazine that he intends to oversee legislation that addresses global warming and climate change caused by carbon emissions from automobiles, energy companies and industry (citation: June 2007 issue, Time magazine).

Political views

Dingell is generally classed as a liberal Democrat, and throughout his career he has been a leading congressional supporter of organized labor, of social welfare measures and of traditional progressive policies. At the beginning of every Congress, Dingell introduces a bill providing for a national health insurance system, the same bill that his father proposed while he was in Congress. However, he was a strong proponent of Bill Clinton's managed-care proposal early in his administration.

Rep. Dingell & Rep. Rahm Emanuel sharing pączki

On some issues, though, he reflects the conservative values of his largely Catholic and working-class district. He was a supporter of the Vietnam War until 1971. Although he supported the Johnson Administration's civil rights bills, he opposed campaigns to expand school desegregation to the Detroit suburbs via mandatory busing. He takes a moderately conservative position on abortion. He has voted against clean air bills if these appear to threaten Detroit's automobile industry.

An avid sportsman and hunter, he strongly opposes gun control, and is a former board member of the National Rifle Association. For many years, Dingell has received an A+ rating from the NRA.

The political analyst Michael Barone wrote of Dingell in 2002:

"There is something grand about the range of Dingell's experience and about his adherence to his philosophy over a very long career. He is an old-fashioned social Democrat who knows that most voters don't agree with his goals of a single-payer national health insurance plan but presses forward toward that goal as far as he can. 'It's hard to believe that there was once no Social Security or Medicare', he says. 'The Dingell family helped change that. My father worked on Social Security and for national health insurance, and I sat in the chair and presided over the House as Medicare passed (in 1965). I went with Lyndon Johnson for the signing of Medicare at the Harry S. Truman Library, and I have successfully fought efforts to privatize Social Security and Medicare'. Whether you agree or disagree, the social democratic tradition is one of the great traditions in our history, and John Dingell has fought for it for a very long time."

Environment

For his conduct regarding environmental issues during the 109th Congress the nonpartisan watchdog group League of Conservation Voters has awarded Dingell its highest rating, 100%. According to the LCV, Dingell voted "pro-environment" on twelve out of twelve issues the group deemed critical; they also praised him for introducing, with representatives James Oberstar and Jim Leach, an amendment compelling the EPA to rescind a directive issued in 2003 by the Bush Administration "requiring EPA staff to get permission from headquarters before protecting 'isolated' water bodies like vernal pools, prairie potholes, playa lakes and bogs," which provide "critical wildife habitat, store flood water, and protect drinking water supplies." Dingell is also a member of the Congressional Wildlife Refuge Caucus.

Dingell has opposed raising mandatory automobile fuel efficiency standards, which he helped to write in the 1970s. Instead he has indicated that he intends to pursue a regulatory structure that takes greenhouse gas emissions and oil consumption into account.

In July of 2007, Dingell indicated he planned to introduce a new a tax on carbon usage in order to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. This was seen as an honest, commendable move by many considering the recent strong criticisms of the politics of global warming; primarily the fact that if proponents were so serious about the issue, they would enact policies that would have a direct, tangible effect, such as a carbon tax. Rather, many in Washington have opted toward relatively ineffective policy measures that seem productive and efficient ostensibly, but in reality shift cost burdens onto businesses who then indirectly pass those costs onto their customers. This has been observed as a craven political scheme to exploit the potentially serious issue of global warming while not actively addressing the problem since it may require new policies that voters, contrary to polling numbers, may not be willing to pay for. The recent changes to automobile efficiency standards are a perfect example of such convoluted legislation as they will not yield any substantial reductions in greenhouse emissions and they place an unfair burden on the automotive industry, of which many of Rep. Dingell’s constituents are members.

Private sector ties

Dingell has drawn criticism for his ties to the automotive industry. The three largest contributors to his campaign for the 2006 election cycle are political action committees, employees, or other affiliates of General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and DaimlerChrysler; since 1989, intermediaries for these corporations have contributed more than $US 600,000 to his campaign. Dingell also holds an unknown quantity, more than $US 1 million, in assets through General Motors stock options and savings-stock purchase programs; his spouse, Debbie Dingell, worked as a lobbyist for the corporation until they married, whereupon she moved to an administrative position there. At present Ms. Dingell is a senior executive at General Motors and vice chair of the General Motors Foundation.

The Baltimore case

In the 1980s Dingell led a series of congressional hearings to pursue alleged scientific fraud by Thereza Imanishi-Kari and Nobel Prize-winner David Baltimore. Although the scientists were later exonerated, the hearings and negative publicity surrounding them forced David Baltimore to resign as president of Rockefeller University and caused Imanishi-Kari to lose a tenure-track position.

The story of the case is described in Daniel Kevles' book The Baltimore Case and the book "The Great Betrayal : Fraud in Science" by Horace Freeland Judson For a different perspective, see Lang's study (updated and reprinted in his book, "Challenges" (New York: Springer-Verlag; 1997)).

External links

• The Honorable John D. Dingell official House site
• United States Congress. "John Dingell (id: d000355)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
• Federal Election Commission — Mr John D Dingell campaign finance reports and data
• On the Issues — John Dingell issue positions and quotes
• OpenSecrets.org — John D. Dingell campaign contributions
• Project Vote Smart — Representative John D. Dingell (MI) profile
• SourceWatch Congresspedia — John Dingell profile
• Washington Post — Congress Votes Database: John Dingell voting record
• John D. Dingell for U.S. Congress official campaign site
• Michigan Democratic Party
• Michigan Liberal's 15th Congressional District section
• Dingell's account of his civil rights record